8 ms·

Great! We're better overall than we were! No reason to rest on our laurels, though. How can we be better than we are now? Here's some areas that aren't doing t

by diafygi 12y ago

Great! We're better overall than we were! No reason to rest on our laurels, though. How can we be better than we are now? Here's some areas that aren't doing too well: 1. Climate Change - We're in store for a lot of trouble over the next few decades[1]. How will we manage? 2. Wealth Inequality - The gap is widening[2]. How do we reverse the trend? 3. Gerrymandering/voter suppression - The ones in power are the ones who draw the district boundaries[3]. How do we stop the feedback loop? [1]: http://ipcc-wg2.gov/AR5/ http://ipcc-wg2.gov/AR5/ [2]: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/12/racial-wealth-gaps-great-recession/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/12/racial-wealt... [3]: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/the-pernicious-effects-of-gerrymandering/383418/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/the-pern...

ef4 12y ago
> Wealth Inequality - The gap is widening In the US, yes. Globally, no. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/upshot/income-inequality-is-not-rising-globally-its-falling-.html?abt=0002&abg=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/upshot/income-inequality-i...
- bluthru 12y ago
  That just makes us even more embarrassing.
  - saryant 12y ago
    "Globally" includes the billion or so people lifted out of poverty in the last twenty years.
  - SamReidHughes 12y ago
    If globalization is what's driving down wages for lower-wage Americans that's not embarrassing, that's just math.
  - MarkPNeyer 12y ago
    the us had a higher standard of living than the rest of the world for years. now the rest of the world is catching up to us; that means things will seem to suck for us by comparison for a while.
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  Simpson's Paradox: within almost every country it's widening, but between countries it's shrinking.
  - unholiness 12y ago
    To clarify (since Simpson's paradox really only applies when tracking the average of a single variable, not its "inequality", or standard devation): The local increases in income inequality don't contradict global decreases because populations are mixing between countries. If an average American moves to Zambia and an average Zambian moves to America, the result is that the income gap of both nations increases, while the worldwide income gap remains the same.
marknutter 12y ago
the article said we should rest on our laurels?
- burkaman 12y ago
  No, but you don't need to disagree with the article in order to make a useful comment. This is just a natural continuation of the discussion.
ps4fanboy 12y ago
> 1. Climate Change Unless the group think around nuclear power changes climate change doesnt stand a chance in hell. EDIT: I would be interested hearing from peoples points of view for those who are downvoting.
- tim333 12y ago
  There are other CO2 free options apart from nuclear. If you believe solar installation is increasing exponentially a la Kurzweil then we'll soon have enough solar http://bigthink.com/think-tank/ray-kurzweil-solar-will-power-the-world-in-16-years http://bigthink.com/think-tank/ray-kurzweil-solar-will-power... You can argue solar / wind is already cheaper and the differential is only going to grow http://cleantechnica.com/2014/04/26/wind-solar-can-generate-electricity-half-cost-nuclear/ http://cleantechnica.com/2014/04/26/wind-solar-can-generate-... Fair enough at the moment wind/solar don't work all the time but they are working on that. The cleantechnia article for example looks at natural gas powered generation for backup and we may get better at storage tech, who knows?
  - growupkids 12y ago
    Doesnt use of natural gas have an adverse impact on climate change?
    - twoodfin 12y ago
      Not if it's replacing coal.
  - jeremyt 12y ago
    According to two very smart PhD engineers who work for Google and were assigned to look into this problem, there is no way to get there with wind and solar. http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-rea...
    - ps4fanboy 12y ago
monkeypizza 12y ago
Focusing solely on wealth inequality leads to strange conclusions: The richest people should destroy productive resources But destroying productive resources (efficient water purifiers, better solar panels, computers that do more computations using less energy) would have been wrong in almost all of history - so why would we adopt beliefs now which make it right? I think it makes more sense to focus on getting everyone to a basic level of freedom & choice; i.e. good health, good education, and freedom of information. A successful world is one where everyone has at least these basics. In that world, we don't have to worry if the richest person's swiss bank account balance doubles, or they build a few more mansions. The problem of wealth is the people who don't have enough!
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  > The richest people should destroy productive resources No. Focusing on inequality would lead to the conclusion that the richest should hand over some of their capital resources to the middle classes and the poor, ie: to the working class.
  - monkeypizza 12y ago
    Say there's someone who wants to reduce inequality, and we ask them whether they approve of various scenarios: Situation: "People living on a certain well-off island discover a way to farm more efficiently, which means they produce 10% more food, but that technology only works on their island. Is this good or bad?" Inequality reducer: "This is bad, because that island's average income will go up while the rest of the world stays the same" Situation: "We discover a free, simple cure for Alzheimer's" Inequality reducer: "That's horrible, because Alzheimer's does the most damage to highly educated countries - those countries will now have way more mentally together, experienced 70-year-olds making them even richer, which will increase economic inequality with poorer countries where fewer people suffer from alzheimer's" You have got to see this is a bit weird, right? It's a focus on minimizing local distortions sometimes can have a bad effect. In fact, imagine we really did have "equality" - the anti-inequality advocate would object to any change in that world, since it would lead to a temporary bit of inequality as information about the change propagated through it. Even simple things like the first invention of mechanized agriculture, or machines to make clothing, introduced tons of inequality at first, since there was only one copy of them at first! But we're better off now that our civilization doesn't have to devote 50% of everyone's life to growing food & making clothes by hand! The other way to think about it is that that we just have to make sure everyone has at least a basic level of food, health, education, and freedom. That lets us focus on the main problems (people who don't have enough), and never could lead us into condemning gains in human quality of life.
Hermel 12y ago
In the US, wealth inequality correlates strongly with median age over time. In a regression, raising median age can explain 89% of the raise in wealth inequality of the top 10% (my own calculation, using Picketty data, not online yet). The hypothesis behind this is that inequality tends to grow with age. Among 20 year olds, there is much less inequality than among 60 year olds. In fact, the richest even grow in wealth after retirement thanks to capital gains, widening the gap even more. Maybe the system did not get less fair over the years, just the people older? I would guess that inequality within age groups did not change much over the past 50 years. But those age groups with lots of inequality grew larger.
- rskar 12y ago
  Are you suggesting that the bottom 90% of households are predominately headed by under-40 year-olds? According to payscale.com, among those with college degrees or higher, pay for men stops growing about age 48; for women, about 39. (See http://www.payscale.com/gender-lifetime-earnings-gap http://www.payscale.com/gender-lifetime-earnings-gap ) In your defence, there is this: http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/economic-intelligence/2012/02/03/blame-the-income-gap-on-demographics-not-capitalism http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/economic-intelligence/20... ; in which Joseph Mason, Moyse/LBA Chair of Banking at the Ourso School of Business at Louisiana State University and a senior fellow at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, suggests that the demographics of income and wealth inequality will go away with the Baby Boomers. However, that article doesn't go into or cite any real analysis. A contrary opinion by Phillip Longman in 2008 (at http://newamerica.net/files/Longman-Remarks.pdf http://newamerica.net/files/Longman-Remarks.pdf) actually goes into more detail on baby boomers and money: Could it really be that a typical household headed by a person in their 50s has disposable income of over $85,000 dollars? ... [Sure] enough, [the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey] shows average household income numbers for that cohort in the range of $85,000. ... The medium income numbers were much, much lower. For example, in 2006, according the Census Bureau, households headed by a person 45-54 had an average income $85,812. But the medium income of such households was some $20,000 less. The difference between average and medium works out to about 25 percent. ... Income inequality, let alone wealth inequality, in this generation is extremely high. Its average income includes the earnings of Bill Gates and countless other baby boom billionaires, plus a very large new class of McMansion-owning minor millionaires. Because of very high income inequality within the baby boom generation, medium income statistics tell us a much more accurate story than do average income stats about how the “typical” baby boomer lives. Age could easily explain the apparent "wealth inequality", but not so much in regards to "income inequality". Yet "income inequality" can easily be shown to be a factor towards "wealth inequality". According to Pew Research (see http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/17/wealth-gap-upper-middle-income/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/17/wealth-gap-u...): The wealth gap between America’s high income group and everyone else has reached record high levels since the economic recovery from the Great Recession of 2007-09, with a clear trajectory of increasing wealth for the upper-income families and no wealth growth for the middle- and lower-income families. In 2013, the median wealth of the nation’s upper-income families ($639,400) was nearly seven times the median wealth of middle-income families ($96,500) - the widest wealth gap seen in 30 years when the Federal Reserve began collecting these data. My suggestion: Let's stop conflating the issues of "wealth inequality" and "income inequality". The real crux of the matter is in the "income inequality". There's been wage stagnation for decades despite productivity gains. In America anyway, the tax code is rigged against earned income in favor of unearned income. Overall, it is better to be "wealthy" than to be "gainfully employed".
Fuxy 12y ago
> Wealth Inequality - The gap is widening The US currency and most other currencies are working against the people and in favor of the bankers. Probably one of the best solutions that have presented themselves for this problem is bit-coin but since it is extremely volatile and still underused at the moment it is not ready yet. Here's [1] a simple youtube animation that explains it better than anything i have seen. [1]: http://youtu.be/mII9NZ8MMVM http://youtu.be/mII9NZ8MMVM
austerity 12y ago
Why should I care about the relative wealth of the rich instead of absolute wealth of the poor?
- JanezStupar 12y ago
  This is the key question for me too. Nowadays a blue collar worker (at least here in EU) has better living conditions than the wealthiest and more powerful mere hundred years ago. Nowadays nobody has to die because of bad teeth and everybody has access to cheap and effective education and through that to other means of production.
  - felixgallo 12y ago
    The poor generally have none of: * dental insurance * effective inexpensive dental care * effective education * access to effective education * a pathway to 'other means of production' * better living conditions than the wealthiest of a mere 100 years ago (the second industrial revolution and the gilded age, where the rich were incredibly rich, and the poor were utterly wretched)
- david_b 12y ago
  In many countries exerting influence in the democratic process is heavily tied to the monetary resources of the person doing the influencing. Given that mechanism it might be easier to remove the wealth inequality than to dismantle the inequality in the democratic process directly.
- Retra 12y ago
  Because human happiness and value are not measured in absolute terms.
- FeeTinesAMady 12y ago
  Because they buy laws that favour them and increase that inequality.
codeshaman 12y ago
This. I'd also add: 4. World is more armed than ever. Ability to destroy life any times over. 5. Tech is in the hands of a few corporations, mass surveillance and political repression, censorship is a fact of life in many countries. As it grows more powerful, it'll give bad people more power to control, suppress and oppress. 6. Pollution, urbanisation, exploitation of nature - a lot of species face extinction within the next 50 years. Disconnect from nature grows worldwide, that leads to all sorts of physical and psychological ailments in people. [4]: http://www.sipri.org/media/pressreleases/2014/nuclear_May_2014 http://www.sipri.org/media/pressreleases/2014/nuclear_May_20... [5]: ? [6]: http://www.nature.com/news/biodiversity-life-a-status-report-1.16523 http://www.nature.com/news/biodiversity-life-a-status-report...
zmanian 12y ago
The biggest overall concerns is that these gains seem to be the benefits of systems that are unraveling. 1. The effective constraint of the short term self interests of nation states via various international norms against armed conflict, internal repression and crimes against humanity. 2. The fossil fuel economy. The plausible replacements for these systems seem much less stable at the current moment.
Umn55 12y ago
"How can we be better than we are now?" By getting informed on what is REALLY happening, i.e. if you are participating in electoral democracy, you're part of the misinformed set. Reasoning and the human brain doesn't work the way we thought it did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ Manufacturing consent http://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Economy-Media/dp/0375714499 http://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Econom... Most have no clue what's really going on in the world... the elites are afraid of political awakening. This (mass surveillance) by the NSA and abuse by law enforcement is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ttv6n7PFniY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ttv6n7PFniY Brezinski at a press conference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kmUS--QCYY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kmUS--QCYY The real news: http://therealnews.com/t2/ http://therealnews.com/t2/ http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Incorporated-Managed-Inverted-Totalitarianism/dp/069114589X/ http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Incorporated-Managed-Inverte... http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Government-Surveillance-Security-Single-Superpower/dp/1608463656/r http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Government-Surveillance-Securit... http://www.amazon.com/National-Security-Government-Michael-Glennon/dp/0190206446/ http://www.amazon.com/National-Security-Government-Michael-G... Look at the following graphs: IMGUR link - http://imgur.com/a/FShfb http://imgur.com/a/FShfb http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html And then... WIKILEAKS: U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti So Hanes And Levis Would Stay Cheap http://www.businessinsider.com/wikileaks-haiti-minimum-wage-the-nation-2011-6 http://www.businessinsider.com/wikileaks-haiti-minimum-wage-... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnkNKipiiiM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnkNKipiiiM Free markets? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349 Free trade? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju06F3Os64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju06F3Os64 http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Illusion-Literacy-Triumph-Spectacle/dp/1568586132/ http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Illusion-Literacy-Triumph-Spect... "We now live in two Americas. One—now the minority—functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other—the majority—is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority—which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected—presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society. In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges navigates this culture—attending WWF contests, the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, and Ivy League graduation ceremonies—to expose an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion." Important history: http://williamblum.org/ http://williamblum.org/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcA1v2n7WW4#t=2551 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcA1v2n7WW4#t=2551
fwn 12y ago
Wealth inequality itself does no harm as long as you don't try to judge it through some ideological lense. Surely you mean that the amount of poor people is rising. This isn't the case. Instead various political interest groups even had to fiddle a lot to produce few relative, always variable poverty definitions to keep the "poverty is rising" claim valid.

by diafygi 12y ago

ef4 12y ago

> Wealth Inequality - The gap is widening In the US, yes. Globally, no. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/upshot/income-inequality-is-not-rising-globally-its-falling-.html?abt=0002&abg=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/upshot/income-inequality-i...

bluthru 12y ago
That just makes us even more embarrassing.
- saryant 12y ago
  "Globally" includes the billion or so people lifted out of poverty in the last twenty years.
- SamReidHughes 12y ago
  If globalization is what's driving down wages for lower-wage Americans that's not embarrassing, that's just math.
- MarkPNeyer 12y ago
  the us had a higher standard of living than the rest of the world for years. now the rest of the world is catching up to us; that means things will seem to suck for us by comparison for a while.
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
Simpson's Paradox: within almost every country it's widening, but between countries it's shrinking.
- unholiness 12y ago
  To clarify (since Simpson's paradox really only applies when tracking the average of a single variable, not its "inequality", or standard devation): The local increases in income inequality don't contradict global decreases because populations are mixing between countries. If an average American moves to Zambia and an average Zambian moves to America, the result is that the income gap of both nations increases, while the worldwide income gap remains the same.

marknutter 12y ago

the article said we should rest on our laurels?

burkaman 12y ago
No, but you don't need to disagree with the article in order to make a useful comment. This is just a natural continuation of the discussion.

ps4fanboy 12y ago

> 1. Climate Change Unless the group think around nuclear power changes climate change doesnt stand a chance in hell. EDIT: I would be interested hearing from peoples points of view for those who are downvoting.

tim333 12y ago
There are other CO2 free options apart from nuclear. If you believe solar installation is increasing exponentially a la Kurzweil then we'll soon have enough solar http://bigthink.com/think-tank/ray-kurzweil-solar-will-power-the-world-in-16-years http://bigthink.com/think-tank/ray-kurzweil-solar-will-power... You can argue solar / wind is already cheaper and the differential is only going to grow http://cleantechnica.com/2014/04/26/wind-solar-can-generate-electricity-half-cost-nuclear/ http://cleantechnica.com/2014/04/26/wind-solar-can-generate-... Fair enough at the moment wind/solar don't work all the time but they are working on that. The cleantechnia article for example looks at natural gas powered generation for backup and we may get better at storage tech, who knows?
- growupkids 12y ago
  Doesnt use of natural gas have an adverse impact on climate change?
  - twoodfin 12y ago
    Not if it's replacing coal.
- jeremyt 12y ago
  According to two very smart PhD engineers who work for Google and were assigned to look into this problem, there is no way to get there with wind and solar. http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-rea...
  - ps4fanboy 12y ago

monkeypizza 12y ago

Focusing solely on wealth inequality leads to strange conclusions: The richest people should destroy productive resources But destroying productive resources (efficient water purifiers, better solar panels, computers that do more computations using less energy) would have been wrong in almost all of history - so why would we adopt beliefs now which make it right? I think it makes more sense to focus on getting everyone to a basic level of freedom & choice; i.e. good health, good education, and freedom of information. A successful world is one where everyone has at least these basics. In that world, we don't have to worry if the richest person's swiss bank account balance doubles, or they build a few more mansions. The problem of wealth is the people who don't have enough!

eli_gottlieb 12y ago
> The richest people should destroy productive resources No. Focusing on inequality would lead to the conclusion that the richest should hand over some of their capital resources to the middle classes and the poor, ie: to the working class.
- monkeypizza 12y ago
  Say there's someone who wants to reduce inequality, and we ask them whether they approve of various scenarios: Situation: "People living on a certain well-off island discover a way to farm more efficiently, which means they produce 10% more food, but that technology only works on their island. Is this good or bad?" Inequality reducer: "This is bad, because that island's average income will go up while the rest of the world stays the same" Situation: "We discover a free, simple cure for Alzheimer's" Inequality reducer: "That's horrible, because Alzheimer's does the most damage to highly educated countries - those countries will now have way more mentally together, experienced 70-year-olds making them even richer, which will increase economic inequality with poorer countries where fewer people suffer from alzheimer's" You have got to see this is a bit weird, right? It's a focus on minimizing local distortions sometimes can have a bad effect. In fact, imagine we really did have "equality" - the anti-inequality advocate would object to any change in that world, since it would lead to a temporary bit of inequality as information about the change propagated through it. Even simple things like the first invention of mechanized agriculture, or machines to make clothing, introduced tons of inequality at first, since there was only one copy of them at first! But we're better off now that our civilization doesn't have to devote 50% of everyone's life to growing food & making clothes by hand! The other way to think about it is that that we just have to make sure everyone has at least a basic level of food, health, education, and freedom. That lets us focus on the main problems (people who don't have enough), and never could lead us into condemning gains in human quality of life.

Hermel 12y ago

In the US, wealth inequality correlates strongly with median age over time. In a regression, raising median age can explain 89% of the raise in wealth inequality of the top 10% (my own calculation, using Picketty data, not online yet). The hypothesis behind this is that inequality tends to grow with age. Among 20 year olds, there is much less inequality than among 60 year olds. In fact, the richest even grow in wealth after retirement thanks to capital gains, widening the gap even more. Maybe the system did not get less fair over the years, just the people older? I would guess that inequality within age groups did not change much over the past 50 years. But those age groups with lots of inequality grew larger.

rskar 12y ago
Are you suggesting that the bottom 90% of households are predominately headed by under-40 year-olds? According to payscale.com, among those with college degrees or higher, pay for men stops growing about age 48; for women, about 39. (See http://www.payscale.com/gender-lifetime-earnings-gap http://www.payscale.com/gender-lifetime-earnings-gap ) In your defence, there is this: http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/economic-intelligence/2012/02/03/blame-the-income-gap-on-demographics-not-capitalism http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/economic-intelligence/20... ; in which Joseph Mason, Moyse/LBA Chair of Banking at the Ourso School of Business at Louisiana State University and a senior fellow at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, suggests that the demographics of income and wealth inequality will go away with the Baby Boomers. However, that article doesn't go into or cite any real analysis. A contrary opinion by Phillip Longman in 2008 (at http://newamerica.net/files/Longman-Remarks.pdf http://newamerica.net/files/Longman-Remarks.pdf) actually goes into more detail on baby boomers and money: Could it really be that a typical household headed by a person in their 50s has disposable income of over $85,000 dollars? ... [Sure] enough, [the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey] shows average household income numbers for that cohort in the range of $85,000. ... The medium income numbers were much, much lower. For example, in 2006, according the Census Bureau, households headed by a person 45-54 had an average income $85,812. But the medium income of such households was some $20,000 less. The difference between average and medium works out to about 25 percent. ... Income inequality, let alone wealth inequality, in this generation is extremely high. Its average income includes the earnings of Bill Gates and countless other baby boom billionaires, plus a very large new class of McMansion-owning minor millionaires. Because of very high income inequality within the baby boom generation, medium income statistics tell us a much more accurate story than do average income stats about how the “typical” baby boomer lives. Age could easily explain the apparent "wealth inequality", but not so much in regards to "income inequality". Yet "income inequality" can easily be shown to be a factor towards "wealth inequality". According to Pew Research (see http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/17/wealth-gap-upper-middle-income/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/17/wealth-gap-u...): The wealth gap between America’s high income group and everyone else has reached record high levels since the economic recovery from the Great Recession of 2007-09, with a clear trajectory of increasing wealth for the upper-income families and no wealth growth for the middle- and lower-income families. In 2013, the median wealth of the nation’s upper-income families ($639,400) was nearly seven times the median wealth of middle-income families ($96,500) - the widest wealth gap seen in 30 years when the Federal Reserve began collecting these data. My suggestion: Let's stop conflating the issues of "wealth inequality" and "income inequality". The real crux of the matter is in the "income inequality". There's been wage stagnation for decades despite productivity gains. In America anyway, the tax code is rigged against earned income in favor of unearned income. Overall, it is better to be "wealthy" than to be "gainfully employed".

Fuxy 12y ago

> Wealth Inequality - The gap is widening The US currency and most other currencies are working against the people and in favor of the bankers. Probably one of the best solutions that have presented themselves for this problem is bit-coin but since it is extremely volatile and still underused at the moment it is not ready yet. Here's [1] a simple youtube animation that explains it better than anything i have seen. [1]: http://youtu.be/mII9NZ8MMVM http://youtu.be/mII9NZ8MMVM

austerity 12y ago

Why should I care about the relative wealth of the rich instead of absolute wealth of the poor?

JanezStupar 12y ago
This is the key question for me too. Nowadays a blue collar worker (at least here in EU) has better living conditions than the wealthiest and more powerful mere hundred years ago. Nowadays nobody has to die because of bad teeth and everybody has access to cheap and effective education and through that to other means of production.
- felixgallo 12y ago
  The poor generally have none of: * dental insurance * effective inexpensive dental care * effective education * access to effective education * a pathway to 'other means of production' * better living conditions than the wealthiest of a mere 100 years ago (the second industrial revolution and the gilded age, where the rich were incredibly rich, and the poor were utterly wretched)
david_b 12y ago
In many countries exerting influence in the democratic process is heavily tied to the monetary resources of the person doing the influencing. Given that mechanism it might be easier to remove the wealth inequality than to dismantle the inequality in the democratic process directly.
Retra 12y ago
Because human happiness and value are not measured in absolute terms.
FeeTinesAMady 12y ago
Because they buy laws that favour them and increase that inequality.

codeshaman 12y ago

This. I'd also add: 4. World is more armed than ever. Ability to destroy life any times over. 5. Tech is in the hands of a few corporations, mass surveillance and political repression, censorship is a fact of life in many countries. As it grows more powerful, it'll give bad people more power to control, suppress and oppress. 6. Pollution, urbanisation, exploitation of nature - a lot of species face extinction within the next 50 years. Disconnect from nature grows worldwide, that leads to all sorts of physical and psychological ailments in people. [4]: http://www.sipri.org/media/pressreleases/2014/nuclear_May_2014 http://www.sipri.org/media/pressreleases/2014/nuclear_May_20... [5]: ? [6]: http://www.nature.com/news/biodiversity-life-a-status-report-1.16523 http://www.nature.com/news/biodiversity-life-a-status-report...

zmanian 12y ago

The biggest overall concerns is that these gains seem to be the benefits of systems that are unraveling. 1. The effective constraint of the short term self interests of nation states via various international norms against armed conflict, internal repression and crimes against humanity. 2. The fossil fuel economy. The plausible replacements for these systems seem much less stable at the current moment.

Umn55 12y ago

"How can we be better than we are now?" By getting informed on what is REALLY happening, i.e. if you are participating in electoral democracy, you're part of the misinformed set. Reasoning and the human brain doesn't work the way we thought it did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ Manufacturing consent http://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Economy-Media/dp/0375714499 http://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Econom... Most have no clue what's really going on in the world... the elites are afraid of political awakening. This (mass surveillance) by the NSA and abuse by law enforcement is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ttv6n7PFniY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ttv6n7PFniY Brezinski at a press conference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kmUS--QCYY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kmUS--QCYY The real news: http://therealnews.com/t2/ http://therealnews.com/t2/ http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Incorporated-Managed-Inverted-Totalitarianism/dp/069114589X/ http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Incorporated-Managed-Inverte... http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Government-Surveillance-Security-Single-Superpower/dp/1608463656/r http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Government-Surveillance-Securit... http://www.amazon.com/National-Security-Government-Michael-Glennon/dp/0190206446/ http://www.amazon.com/National-Security-Government-Michael-G... Look at the following graphs: IMGUR link - http://imgur.com/a/FShfb http://imgur.com/a/FShfb http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html And then... WIKILEAKS: U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti So Hanes And Levis Would Stay Cheap http://www.businessinsider.com/wikileaks-haiti-minimum-wage-the-nation-2011-6 http://www.businessinsider.com/wikileaks-haiti-minimum-wage-... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnkNKipiiiM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnkNKipiiiM Free markets? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349 Free trade? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju06F3Os64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju06F3Os64 http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Illusion-Literacy-Triumph-Spectacle/dp/1568586132/ http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Illusion-Literacy-Triumph-Spect... "We now live in two Americas. One—now the minority—functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other—the majority—is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority—which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected—presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society. In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges navigates this culture—attending WWF contests, the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, and Ivy League graduation ceremonies—to expose an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion." Important history: http://williamblum.org/ http://williamblum.org/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcA1v2n7WW4#t=2551 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcA1v2n7WW4#t=2551

fwn 12y ago

Wealth inequality itself does no harm as long as you don't try to judge it through some ideological lense. Surely you mean that the amount of poor people is rising. This isn't the case. Instead various political interest groups even had to fiddle a lot to produce few relative, always variable poverty definitions to keep the "poverty is rising" claim valid.